


the fortune-maker

by SearchingforSerendipity



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-28
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-08-18 09:14:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8156992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SearchingforSerendipity/pseuds/SearchingforSerendipity
Summary: It will be said that the Avatar's wife waited at home for him, that he forgot about her more oft than than not, and had little to do with the furnishing and keeping of their mountain-home, quiet with the lack of children. It will be said that she was a kind and faithful woman, and that will be a lie, and that she spent her days waiting, which is a greater lie.It is a lie of her own making, though, so she does not mind it so much.





	

 

 

 **V**  
.

 

It will be said that the Avatar's wife waited at home for him, that he forgot about her more oft than than not, and had little to do with the furnishing and keeping of their mountain-home, quiet with the lack of children. It will be said that she was a kind and faithful woman, and that will be a lie, and that she spent her days waiting, which is a greater lie.

It is a lie of her own making, though, so she does not mind it so much. 

Meng hears complains and passes judgements in the morning and counts rice in the evening. People still do not know of Mapako, and few care to venture the chilly winds and the short Summer's for the hopes of finding the Avatar. Her hands know the shape of the abacus well until she does not need it, and instead of asking her what will happen people ask her how it will happen. She has no family. Her husband is away most of the year; she chops her own wood and shares her baked bean puffs with her neighbors and all her windows are always open, to let the mountain's breath inside the house. 

She is alone, and occasionally lonesome, but it matters not: the wind loves her well and so she can never be lonely.

 

  
**IV**  
.

  
They are married on an autumn day, with the cherry blossoms falling like stars and softening their stand on the earth. It is only them, the hot stone beneath, the cloudy sky ahead and above. They are old, older than Meng thought she would be when she married. She had picked flowers all that morning, the ones that grow among the lava-stones, purple and pink inside, pale white outside. By noon she'd been leaning on her cane for the way down. They crown her head and his, held loosely behind his big ears.

After, he will leave her. They will bed each other and dance and laugh and he will leave, because her new husband is of autumn and restless. Because Meng has no need for someone to hold her up, for a man to wait for her at home and complain that she gives too much of her time to the village. Because they are Meng and Aang and their names rhyme, they understand each other.

 Perhaps she will fly with him on the soft winds. Perhaps. There is much to see and much to learn, and she has been reliably told that there are other mountains out there. She wants to scale them more than anything. 

Meng does not need to be a fortune teller to tell her that he will be back by spring.

 

 **III**  
.

 

The illness rends her barren.

It would rend her useless as well, except that Meng is young and while Madame Wun does not receive many offerings anymore, she never stops sharing the ones she has. She recovers, first a slow quiet ending of that terrible cough, than hands that do not shake as much. Her sores scar, but that is to be expected. She cries when her hair is cut, and hides her bald head under a cap. Walking becomes a chore and a tragedy, for her who loved to run and feel the air stinging her cheeks.

She is helping around with the other patients long before she is cured.

The thing about Meng is that she is easy to forget. She has no family, her foster keeper had been revealed a fraud by the Avatar himself. But when Madame Wun dies and leaves her with all the secrets of the village, the most cherished desires and most mundane needs, she finds out she has learned, surprisingly and without noticing, what to do. Her legacy is the ability to tell people what they want to hear and make them believe it can be true. Meng is a girl without dowry or husband or hope for children, and in another time she would be shunned, but this is the only time she has. This is the time for her to stop the returned from becoming scapegoats and needed goats from becoming actual escapes for grief. There is meat to preserve with the water tribe coolers, graves to dig, incense to burn, a harvest to ration and questions to answer, always the questioning and always the answering.

Aang comes on his white bison and the first thing she asks him was if he brough bandages, oils, medicine. He didn't, because he is a man and if Meng has learned anything is that men are useless in these emergencies. He does not recognize her, he says, and asks her if she is an air acolyte, to be bald. 

She does not slap him, but it is a near thing. Meng was never one for rants: she keeps her words short and sweet and at the end of it he is wide-eyed and confused, contrite. That is all she lets herself see of his long looks. 

He does heal many of the sick, though, his hands shining moonlight over flesh. She bites back on her envy and uselssness and makes sure he is as useful as he can be. He bows to her instructions then, grin finally gone, a careful sort of respect in his eyes. This is her kingdom: he is an intruder here, and will help only under her will.

The floozy comes, in time, with other blue-robed women, and Meng learns she is not a floozy. She already knew that, but it took some time to realize it, since at frost she is an intruder with sure orders and soft hands and a knowledge of healing Meng does not have. It takes a long time for her and Katara not to butt heads, but when they do they become friends very fast.

Aang is a different story. He came to her people once, lighter than the summer air, and he returned on a bitter winter. They learn each other in spring. There is laughter and blushes and, fights and long conversations, until the blushes end in kisses and the conversations are held silently and fights that end in laughter. That is all there is to it. 

She can not bend nature or tell the future, but she learns that she can bend the present, sometimes, and shape the future, somewhat. It is not a bad legacy. It is not a bad way to survive.

 

 **II**  
.

 

It would be more interesting to say that the Fire Nation invaded Mapaku not soon after the Avatar left, a greater and more terrible story. The truth is this: all the villagers survive the end of the war, except old Chian and clumsy Din.

Only one battalion passes through. When they see them coming, the villagers panic, pray, yell suggestions and condemnations. Playing fire with fire, Meng thinks, does not work for the Earth Kingdom. Once there was a boy who came to her village on a flying bison, and he saved them from smoke and ruin by telling them the clouds were liers.

But Meng had never stopped believing in the clouds, not really. Here, high in the mountain, it's hard not to believe the things the wind carries. She whispers her idea to Madame Wun's ear, because Madame Wun's word still has some sway, even now, and so in the end they follow her heeding. The soldiers come by, prod at the broken benches and abandoned flowerbeds, the curtain's that had been ripped in a hurry. The whole village hides in the hot caves, sweating and still like a great beast of burden playing dead to a predator.

The soldiers eat the ffod they'd left behind and sleep in the beds thry'd abandoned in the middle of the night and then they're gone. The village they leave behind is shattered but not smoldering, pretend-broken.

They live. Meng cries, and it is enough.

Less than one year later, the colonials return home, or their parent's home, or their grandparent's. They're the descendents of those taken by the Fire Nation during Sozin's time, back before Azulon prohibited the practise. He had not liked to have so many servants (slaves, captives, earth-kingdon dirt) outnumbering his own people. With the end of the war, some tried their luck in finding their old homes, the places they knew from stories and the curses laidon their feet all their lives. 

From high above Meng can see the black spots that crowd the roads. Few come by, but some dare the steep climb for some help, a warm place to sleep at. They are always given warm food and soft bedding, but none of them stay. Their eyes are always too hopeful and hungry for that.

There are other migrants, harried Fire-Nation colonials, and those walk faster and with less of a weight. Sometimes the two groups will meet, and Meng sees that too, the crowd pushing, pulling, breaking. She can't hear the screams, but she'd bet anything they're loud and cowardly. She'd cheer to the sound of them, so maybe that's why the wind doesn't bring them close by. Maybe because it knows that there is no where it can go to bring back her father's voice. 

Those refugees don't stop on Makapo.

But on a sunny summer day, with the sky so hot it's white, toher come. There are bags and chairs and children on their backs, and the hope for recognition on their eyes. Madame Wun tells her to bring out the pallets and they clean the already spotless divinations room. For the first time in a long time, Meng's home feels alive and welcoming. 

The deaths start soon after.

 

 **I**  
.

  
Madame Wun is everything Meng wants to be, if she had to grow old. Her hair is always perfectly coiffed, she knows everything, and she smiles like she knew even more. Meng, with a father gone to find fortune and never returned, with a mother in the earth of four summers, has an unending supply of faith in her. Meng, without a gift except for baking, without a clean cut future and no family, looks at her and sees everything that could be, and tells herself it is what will be.

She very nearly hates Aang and Sokka for a long time, when the food stops coming, when Madame Wun becomes quieter and her hair unkempt. She hates them and their truth and their shapeless sky.

Years later she looks back on that curdling bitterness and cranes her head at the clouds and smiles, knowing.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> come say hi to me on [tumblr](http://searchingforserendipity25.tumblr.com).


End file.
